How Much Can You Earn With Affiliate Marketing?

How Much You Can Earn With Affiliate Marketing? Here’s The Truth!

As with any other business, there is a lot of information floating around about the earnings potential from offering products as an affiliate. The true answer lies somewhere in between those two extremes and depends on a variety of factors. Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative opportunity for you to make money online, but it’s not an easy-entry business. You will have to put in some time and effort before you start seeing returns. However, if your efforts pay off, you can expect to earn anywhere between $100 and $10,000 monthly from affiliate marketing. Here is everything you need to know about how much you can earn with affiliate marketing.

What is an affiliate?

An affiliate, or a publisher, is someone who promotes a company’s product online by publishing a review or article, placing an advert, placing a banner ad, or using an email campaign. At the end of the month, affiliates are rewarded by the company for sales they make, or other agreed events, for example, leads or installs. In other words, if you are an affiliate, you are promoting a company’s product, earning a commission when that product gets sold, and doing all the work. The company whose product you promote will give you a special affiliate link, which you can then use to promote their product. Whenever someone clicks on your affiliate link and buys the product you have promoted, the company will pay you a commission.

How much you can earn with affiliate marketing?

The amount of money you can earn with affiliate marketing will depend on several different factors. The first of these is the commission rate offered by the company you’re promoting. If a company offers a higher commission, you’ll be able to earn more per sale. Additionally, you’ll need to take into account the average order value of the product or service you’re promoting. The more the customers are spending, the more you’ll make in affiliate commissions. These two factors will determine how much you can expect to earn with affiliate marketing. For example, if the company offers you a 10% commission and the average order value is $50, you’ll earn $5 per sale. But if they change the offer to 50% commission and the average order value is $100, you’ll earn $50 per sale. This will have a major impact on how much you can earn with affiliate marketing.

Factors Influencing Affiliate Earnings

The Ad Network Factor: How Much You Can Earn

The ad network that you choose will have a significant impact on the amount of money you can earn with affiliate marketing. Some of the top ad networks will have high-paying advertisers and it will be them that could give you the highest payouts. However, you’ll need to do your research and find the ad network that offers you the best terms. Some ad networks will offer you a fixed rate per click, while others will use a revenue-share model. The revenue-share model will have a huge impact on how much you can earn with affiliate marketing. The more clicks you get and the more sales you make, the more you’ll earn in the revenue-share model. You’ll want to look for an ad network with high payouts and a low threshold.

The Product Type Factor: How Much You Can Earn

The product type you choose to promote will also have a major impact on how much you can earn with affiliate marketing. For example, if you choose to promote a low-priced product, such as a $17 ebook, you’ll earn a lower commission than if you promote a high-priced product, such as a $1,000 software suite. The product type can also have an impact on the network you choose to promote it with. For example, some networks only accept digital products and won’t let you promote other types of products. Other networks might have a minimum payout threshold, which will have a huge impact on how much you can earn.

 

Affiliates Categorization Based on Earnings

Obviously, not all multiple affiliates get the same income. Some, usually beginners, don’t make a lot. Their earnings might be significantly lower than the average salary, which still might be attractive if they are not doing affiliate marketing full-time, but have it as a passive income. More experienced affiliate marketers earn considerably more. Their income can categorize them into intermediate, advanced, and super-affiliates. Here is the common categorization of affiliate earning:

• Beginner – $0 to $1000/per month
• Intermediate $1000 to $10,000/per month
• Advanced – 10k to $100k/per month
• Super Affiliate – $100k+/per month

When just starting it might seem unrealistic to reach an income of $100k per month, but some people prove that it is real. It goes without saying that it requires effort and constant education in the affiliate marketing field, but as with any entrepreneurship, hard work pays off.

Super-affiliates usually have a large network of contacts and followers, detailed knowledge of the affiliate marketing space, and extensive experience with different types of brands. They can charge brands a premium fee to manage their campaigns because they know how to get results.

Let us name a few of them. 

Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn is probably the most famous super affiliate in the world. He has been widely dubbed the “King of Podcasting,” and he is the host of the highly successful “Smart Passive Income” podcast. Pat started his affiliate marketing empire with a LEED blog that he started back in 2008 and monetized rather soon. 

How did he do that? First, he was using Google Adsense to make money off his website clicks. Once his website took off, he released an e-book that brought him some commission off it. After one and a half years his income from doing affiliate marketing via his website was $8000. And that increased to more than $50000 in 2013. 

Since the start, Pat grew his business to $10 million per year. His company, Tropical MBA, is built on a foundation of promoting products and services that help people live better lives. Most of Pat’s income from affiliate marketing comes from promoting digital products and services. Pat has proven that it is possible to make a lot of money through affiliate marketing, even if the products aren’t physical goods.

Shawn Collins

Shawn Collins is one of the most successful super affiliates in the world, and he has been actively earning money from affiliate marketing for over two decades. Back in 1997, he started with the Amazon affiliate program when he set up his first affiliate site. It proved to work successfully, and a bit later tempted by his success case, a medical book company that wanted their own affiliate program offered him a well-paid job.

Shawn has built a diversified business that earns revenue from multiple sources such as his website, books, and live events. He has a large following on social media and a very engaged email list of subscribers. Shawn is an excellent super affiliate who has proven that it is possible to build a long-term business around affiliate marketing.

Finch Sells

Today Finch Sells (real name Martin Osborn) owns his company, Finch Media Ltd, but it hasn’t always been like this. At 29 he dropped out of high school, but before that, he had already started a blog about affiliate marketing. Since then he worked with all kinds of affiliate campaigns, and also consulted brands on the matter of improving their existing conversion funnels.

Charles Ngo

Charles Ngo has been an online marketer, blogger, and speaker at affiliate marketing conferences since 2013. Charles helps novice affiliate marketers achieve success by providing them with information on internet marketing, affiliate marketing, and efficiency on his YouTube channel and website. He also offers a definitive list of the most effective digital marketing tools to assist affiliate marketers in directing individuals to their affiliate links.

Zac Johnson

Zac Johnson has been an affiliate marketer for more than 20 years. He started with Amazon affiliate marketing in 1999 and created his website in 2007 to establish his brand before offering affiliate goods. Through the years, Johnson has experimented with every digital tactic he can to discover the optimal methods for affiliate marketing. Owing to PPC campaigns he grew his mailing list to over 2 million people. He has maintained a website that delivers quality content on everything from affiliate marketing to blogging. In addition to the interviews with successful business owners, he provides an extensive list of resources on blogging, affiliate marketing, and website design.

Choosing a profitable affiliate product

First of all, it all starts with a product. All further marketing schemes and promotional actions build on what type of product you choose to promote. Additionally, it is no secret that some products are more profitable than others, or, they have a shorter sales cycle that makes them more attractive in the eyes of publishers. However, it doesn’t mean that you should blindly fall for them. Products with a shorter sales cycle are usually products with lower prices, and thus, with lower affiliate commissions. The total commissions from these sales per month could amount to the commission from only one product within the same or oven longer time. There is no fast answer to which product to choose, but that one should think about what fits their profile better and which products they are more likely to sell. 

How to develop your affiliate selling strategy

Once you already have a list of products that you want to promote, it’s high time to develop a strategy for promoting them. Without a properly thought-through marketing plan, you put your chances of success in fate’s hands. To develop your affiliate selling strategy, you should first clearly define your target audience and think about how you’ll reach them. Further on, your approach will depend on the channels you use to reach your audience.

Consider your target audience

Before you decide which products to promote and how to promote them, you need to understand your target audience. If you’re not sure who your audience is, try conducting a survey or focus group to see what information you can gather about your potential customers. Once you’ve identified your target audience, you can determine the best way to reach them.

Identify your marketing channels

Your marketing channels will depend on your target audience. Once you’ve identified your target audience, you can better understand which channels they use daily to start from there. You can tailor your strategy based on the products you want to promote and the channels you’ll use to promote them.

Promote your products with a theme

When you promote a large number of different products, it can be hard to stick to a consistent theme. To make your affiliate selling strategy more manageable, promote products that fall under the same theme.

 

Last piece of advice before you go.

Start small and narrow. Don’t try to promote every product you come across. Instead, choose just a few products to promote at first, and then expand as you gain more experience. And don’t forget to evaluate your progress and adjust as needed. You can’t expect to get results if you don’t know how to measure your progress. Let us know whether we can help you with your affiliate marketing strategy. Feel free to contact us here.